That Will Bring us Back to Doe

Turn on a radio and listen to some 'Jewish Music.' It sounds about as Jewish as Led Zeppelin wearing tefillin.

A famous music biz manager once said "I'd rather
have a second-class original than a first-class copy." The
problem with any copy is that even if it is technically
better than the original, it is forever limited by the fact that
it came into existence not as an attempt to create ex nihilo
but as a clone.

If you want to know what original Jewish music sounded
like, it probably sounded much like classical music. Classical
music has its roots in the Gregorian chants of the Catholic church,
and the Gregorian chants were rip-offs of the music that the Levi'im
played in the Holy Temple. When the Romans burned the House
of G-d and exiled the Jewish People, they also exiled our music.
They took it into captivity and made it sing for a new master.

Gregorian chant is monophonic, meaning music that
consists of only one melodic line without accompaniment. The
beauty of the chant lies in the serene, undulating shapes of its
melody which always returns to the tonic, to the fundamental
note - Doe -as in Doe, Re, Mi etc.

The mesmerizing quality of chant comes from an exquisite
longing always to return to the root note of the scale, the tonic.
To return to Doe.

The development of Western music shows an increasingly
complex use of harmony. In the Baroque period, great importance
was attached to the mathematical interlacing of melody lines.
This was known as counterpoint. Composers such as J.S.
Bach were sometimes called upon to instantly compose fugues
to show their technical prowess. But still the melodic structure
always returned to the tonic, to Doe.

The Breakdown of Tonality

The Twentieth Century has produced the highest level
of technological civilization known to man, and at the same time
the greatest violence and barbarism. It has also produced the
greatest era of atheism.

This chaos in the modern world-view has been reflected
in its music. During the First World War, a revolution in music
theory took place, overthrowing all J.S. Bach's rules of harmony
and counterpoint, and changing the way music had sounded for hundreds
of years.

If you play all the notes on a piano, both black
and white, from one Doe to the Doe above it, you
will have played twelve notes. This scale is called the chromatic
scale. Western music from the earliest times was founded on the
diatonic scale which, depending on the key, consists of seven
of those twelve notes. Not all of the notes are used at the same
time. Everyone knows the diatonic scale. It was made famous
by that great musicologist Julie Andrews in her unforgettable
contribution to Western culture: "Doe - a deer, a female
deer...etc."

During World War One, Arnold Schoenberg invented
the twelve-tone scale. Schoenberg decided to use all the
notes in the chromatic scale. After this, there was no longer
a hierarchy of melodic structure where every note inevitably led
back to the tonic, to the root note, to Doe. Now
there was no king. No note to which all the others bent their
heads in submission. In a sense Schoenberg was saying "All
notes are equal! There is no pivotal note. There is no King!
There is no Doe!"

Schoenberg refined his creation and brought it to
perfection in the 1920's. After Schoenberg, composers became
more interested in dissonance than in harmonious consonance.
Once Arnold Schoenberg had "dethroned" the rules of
diatonic composition, many other composers followed suit with
their own compositional styles. The door was now open. These
other composers didn't follow Schoenberg but invented their own
rules of composition. Their methods and styles, including Schoenberg's
twelve-tone music, are called "atonality".

Schoenberg unleashed a genie on the world. After
he had breached the walls of the diatonic scale, eventually almost
anything came to be called 'music.'

In 1943, Germany was burning a people, composing
the darkest cacophony that man could conceive. In the world of
music, John Cage achieved notoriety for his "prepared pianos."
These were pianos, modified by jamming all types of materials
-- from wood to screws to weather-stripping -- into pianos to
alter their sound, and then having pianists strike the keys randomly.
In other compositions, he used a variety of radios or altered
tape recordings all playing simultaneously, or microphones attached
to human bodies in motion.

His most famous composition was "4:33".
A piece for the piano in which the pianist sat in silence
in front of the keys of the piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

Art reflects life. Music reflects life. Just as
tonality became 'a-tonality', so monarchy became 'an-archy'.

Exit The King

As part of the Creation, Hashem wanted there to be
a tangible symbol of His Kingship. From this symbol we would
be able to catch the smallest glimpse, the most distant echo of
the Glory of Heaven, its Awesomeness and its Majesty. For this
reason, Hashem created monarchy. Earthly monarchy is the most
distant whisper of the ineffable Majesty of the King of Kings.

A few hundred years ago, kings ruled with absolute
authority in their lands. More recently, nations have been unwilling
to give to their rulers unbounded dominion; rather the king was
shackled by the rule of the state. Nowadays, the notion of kingship
has been virtually extinguished. Now, so to speak, 'all pigs
are equal."

There remain but a few nations who still conserve
constitutional kingship, but even in those countries, the monarchy
is but a pale puppet show - fodder for the tabloid press. Princes
and princesses look and behave like creatures of the gutter.
Gone is the whisper of Majesty.

Since monarchy was created only to give us a microcosmic
semblance of the Heavenly Kingship, how should we understand this
ebbing of the kings? In other words, if the earthly monarchy
is no more than a reflection of Hashem's Kingship, and a means
to make it easier for us to accept the dominion of Hashem upon
ourselves, why has the power and the status of monarchy been allowed
to wane?

Hashem relates to us through measure for measure.
When the world at large believed in G-d, we were afforded an
ever present representation of Hashem's Kingship in the form of
the rule of kings. This was mirrored in the arts, in music, in
the diatonic scale, where all notes led back to the king - to
Doe. When the world turned to atheism, then Hashem withdrew
the power of kings and there was a concomitant loss of tonality
in music. Similarly in the visual arts, realism gave way to increasing
abstraction and nihilism.

I remember as a small boy in 1953 watching one of
the first postwar television broadcasts in England. It was of
the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It went on all day. And
we watched it all day. We didn't get tired or bored. We squinted
at that murky gray fishbowl in awe and fascination. Even in my
short life, how has that most distant whisper of the divine Kingdom
of Heaven become almost completely inaudible!

And there we stand on Rosh Hashana at the coronation
of the King of Kings. We get tired and bored. It all seems too
long. We struggle to have some feeling of connection to this
most awesome of days...

The basic tenet of Judaism is that Hashem is One.
When a king united his people he was also the symbol of their
unity. Like the note to which all the other notes inevitably
return.

Only when the world perceives the Oneness of Hashem
will kingship return to mankind.

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